Different Outfits

I thought I'd go over here the different types of gear that are available for paladins and how we can put them together into different sets. In general, paladins who have been tanking for quite a while have collected several different sets of gear for different purposes, though a lot of new paladins might not know quite what they are talking about. I'll go through those different sets and the kinds of priorities we make for each of those sets of gear.

The Avoidance Set
The avoidance set is one that focuses on avoiding as many attacks as possible. It tends to be used on really hard hitting bosses, where extra health won't protect us. For example, if something's hitting me for 28k per hit, no extra health will help me survive a second hit. For this set, we're looking for, in order:
Dodge
Defense
Agility
Parry
Armor
Why armor? It doesn't help us dodge, but it makes us easier to heal. While dodge/defense/parry items are best for this kind of set, a little extra armor can help us recover more quickly those times we are hit.

The Dragon Set
What I call the "dragon" set is a set that is used when facing high amounts of magical damage. Basically, it's about stacking hitpoints, hitpoint, hitpoints. Hitting the block cap is nice, but at the end of the day, you want to be able to absorb big breaths. The goal with this set is to be able to absorb huge breaths or spells so that your healers have time to heal you up. This was the big set during the tough fights of early Wrath like Malygos, Sartharion and Sapphiron. Now, it's useful for fights like Razorscale and Ignis.
The priority for this set is:
Stamina
Defense

The Block Set
This threat serves as our threat set and our AoE tanking set. It's also nice for any trash that doesn't hit like a truck (there are a couple bits of trash that do; you'll get used to which ones). Basically, you want to use this where you're offtanking adds that don't have a skull over them, like adds on Deconstructor or, especially, Thorim. It's also great for fights where you spend a lot of your time dpsing. The goal is to maximize survivability on small hits by maximizing block value and then maximize threat by maximizing block value and strength. Putting together a good block set takes a lot of time and effort, as there is often only one suitable piece per slot.
The priority for this set is:
Block Value
Strength
Block Rating
Defense
Stamina

The Mixed Set
A lot of bosses and fights don't require a special set of gear. Sure, the boss might kill you in two hits, so dodge is good, or it might kill you in three hits, so some more stamina is helpful. You need to hold aggro, but it's not an insane dps race. The mixed set is a set I like to use for day-to-day use. Unless something hits exceptionally hard or exceptionally lightly or breathes on me, this set is the one I wear. It's good to be block capped in this set, to get rid of streaks.
There isn't really a priority for this set. I like to think of this set using a point system:
Dodge/Defense/Agility (100)
Parry (80)
Stamina (70)
Hit/Strength (50)
Armor (7)
Dodge, Defense, Agility, Stamina and Armor are all valued at their full item value (1 dodge/def/agility=1.5 stamina=14 armor). Parry's a little lower, just because it doesn't scale as well. Hit and Strength are valued at about half, because threat is nice, but not overwhelmingly important right now.

Those are my four sets that I use for various things. Of course, on occasion, I'll mix things up. For example, a particular boss might require me to generate almost no threat at all, like the second boss on the Iron Council, I'll value strength at 0. If another fight requires taunting to share a boss, I'll value hit more. And so forth. However, these are my standard outfits, and I hope you find them helpful.

Agility and You

I thought I'd write a little post on one of my favourite tanking stats, agility. It's an odd stat to be a fan of, since no tanking gear really has any agility on it. However, we have a number of times where we have the option of using this stat, and knowing those options is worthwhile in itself. What also makes the stat so odd is that it is a "jack of all trades" stat. It gives a little bit of everything: avoidance, EH and threat. In this post, I'm going to discuss why and when you should consider deliberately gemming or enchanting for agility.

The value of agility is easy to compare: sort of. What we can do is show how equivalent it is to dodge rating and how equivalent it is to armor. First, for dodge rating, you get 1% dodge for every 39.35 dodge rating. For agility, you get 1% dodge for every 52.08 agility. However, in almost every raid context, we'll have Kings. So this means we really get 1% dodge for every 47.35 agility.

So, in terms of pure avoidance, 47.35 agility is worth 39.35 dodge. That means that 1 agility is worth 0.83 dodge rating, in terms of pure avoidance.

Dodge obviously wins here, but avoidance isn't the only thing that agility gives us. It also gives us 2 armor. I won't include Kings here, because that would be cheating. Why? Toughness gives us 10% more armor from our items. Kings gives us 10% more armor from our agility. It's tied. So, I'll consider the value of agility as equal to 2 armor.

So, purely from a survival perspective, agility is worth:

0.83 dodge rating + 2 armor

The question now is, how do I figure out how valuable these two are together relative to my other options? Unfortunately, there is no answer. Dodge increases avoidance and armor increases EH. We need different things for different fights, so the value of these two together can only be compared on a fight-to-fight basis.

However, what one can point out is that this actually implies that from an item budget perspective, agility is about equivalent to dodge+armor. In other words, if you're like me and dodge and armor are your two favourite tanking stats and you weigh them about equally, then agility is a reasonable option. How is this the case?

1 dodge rating and 14 armor cost the same in terms of item budget. So, that 2 armor is about 0.14 dodge rating in terms of item budget. Add them together, and:

0.83 dodge + 0.14 = 0.97

So, assuming that you weight armor and dodge equivalently in your item budget, agility is worth about 97% of either armor or dodge.

Now, you're probably reasonably thinking, "Yes, but 97% is worse than 100%, so didn't you just prove that agility is worse than the other two?". Yes and no. So far, I've only considered the survivability that agility gives. What I haven't considered is the threat. 52.08 agility also gives us 1% critical strike to our melee hits, which would mean 47.35 agility counting Kings. Compare this to Critical Strike rating which gives us 1% per 45.91. This includes our white damage, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of Righteousness, Avenger's Shield and, I believe, Judgement. In fact, it affects everything that the Conviction talent affects with the exception of Exorcism. That's not quite all of our threat, since it doesn't include Seal of Corruption or Consecration, but it's certainly most of it.

Most of us would never consider gemming for Critical Strike. However, this doesn't mean we wouldn't sacrifice 3 dodge rating for 100 critical strike rating. So long as one gives any reasonable weight at all to critical strike rating, from a purely item budget perspective, agility is a huge bargain. It gives 0.83 dodge rating, 2 armor and 0.97 critical strike rating (not counting Exorcism).

Agility is therefore a great "well-rounded" stat, giving us a huge item-budget bargain. Where it would be most useful is in a piece of gear that is used in multiple sets. For example, let's say that you use the same leggings for your avoidance set and your EH set. Can't decide how to gem it? Try agility. It does a little bit of both and gives some extra threat to boot. It's especially nice for those red sockets. Either toss in a delicate scarlet ruby or a shifting twilight opal and get the best bargain for your item budget.

Don't forget some of the other sources of agility, too:
+22 agility to cloak.
+20 agility to gloves (people forget about this one).
+26 agility to weapon.
Mongoose to weapon (which gives a little more agility on average than +26 agility).

Agility is a great, well-rounded tanking stat, but it unfortunately isn't found on much of our gear. I hope I've done a good job of showing its utility and how it's one of the best item budget bargains around.

Colourblindness

Colourblindness is a weird disability to have. It's not very serious and it doesn't affect our lives very much. For a lot of people, it goes completely undiagnosed. It tends to come up in very specific circumstances: matching clothes, noticing lipstick and so forth. There are a few things that a colourblind person can't do, like be a police officer or a commercial pilot. However, by and large, being colourblind doesn't make you feel disabled. Most of the time you forget it's even there.

A lot of people don't understand how colourblindness works, so I'll explain here. It affects about four percent of men. The reason it affects mostly men is that it is a recessive gene on the x-chromosome. Since women have two x-chromosomes, unless both carry the gene, they won't manifest it. However, since men have only one, there is nothing to beat out the recessive defect.

When we see, we use two things, rods and cones. We use rods to tell how bright something is, its "value". We use cones to tell what colour something is, its "hue". There are three types of cones, red, green and blue. The vast majority of colourblind people (over 98%) have defective green cones. Such defective cones tend to perceive green as more red or grey. In order to correct for this, our brains kick in and "guess" what the actual colour of things are. As a result, we tend to mix up red, green and grey of the same value. We can even see red as green, because our brain believes our correct perception of red is incorrect and therefore "corrects" it for us. In general, this correction will either be to the colours around it (which is why it is hard to see red text on green background) or to what something normally is (which is why we see fall leaves as green).

The reason I bring all of this up in a Warcraft blog is because, like many games, World of Warcraft occasionally makes things unnecessarily difficult for colourblind players. Specifically, when something red, green or grey is put up against a red, green or grey background of the same value, it can be very hard to see or even completely invisible. The worst example, ever, was the Death and Decay put out by Rage Winterchill. It was completely invisible. If I was healing that fight, I would just run in a random direction until my DBM warning went away. If I was tanking, I would just stand in it. Either way, the faint red mist on the green grass background was completely invisible to me. I actually believed it was invisible at first, until my wife told me that it was red.

The current issue, though, for me is the rockets on Mimiron. A little red image appears on the grey background, and for the first second or two, they are of exactly the same value. The little symbol then pulses, at which point the value changed, and I can see it, although it is very difficult. However, I end up having about half the time to get out of the rocket fire as anyone else and only if I squint.

As someone who has played this game for years and is one of the core tanks for my guild, having these occasional fights where colourblindness is devastating is very frustrating. It's not hard to work around these from a design perspective. Designers just need to be careful not to put red, green or grey visual cues on red, green or grey backgrounds of the same value. It's something more and more designers are doing, since 4% of a male customer base is actually quite substantial. For example, given the number of men who play WoW, there is likely a colourblind person in every 25-man raid.

Ironically, in 3.1, the very patch in which a colourblind patch was put into place (which just puts text on things like epic/rare items), they also put in another fight where colourblindness is a real problem. Several other colourblind players have commented that they have needed to pull out of the fight because they just can't survive the rockets.

I don't think I'll need to go that far. For the next few days, I'm going to be looking for some software to change up the colours on my screen. Otherwise, I'll play in negative, just for Mimiron, or have my wife watch for the circles. However, it's very disappointing to see that, while Blizzard is obviously trying to accommodate colourblind players, they really don't know how. It's not text on epic items we need, but not to have fights that rely on red vs green vs grey cues of the same value. I honestly think they don't know this, but I can't figure out how to tell them.

I've put up a thread on the suggestions forum here. Please support the thread if you have the time.

Strategy: Kologarn

You'll notice I skipped a couple of bosses between Deconstructor and Kologarn. That isn't a co-incidence. Largely, the tanking assignments on those bosses are so straightforward that a guide wouldn't really help very much. I may go back to them later, but for now I want to turn to the somewhat tricky boss, Kologarn. He's the bridge between the Antechamber and the Shattered Walkway in Ulduar and he's a lot of fun. One of the best parts about this fight is that it gives us a real chance to use our block sets that otherwise would collect dust.

My tanking role on this boss is to tank the pack of earth elementals that spawn when his arm dies, but it's a much trickier fight than just that. There are several different phases and lots of ways that you can accidentally wipe the raid if you're not careful, so I'll go through all of those in turn.

First, there are a couple things to note about the mechanics of the fight. Kologarn starts with two "hands" a right hand and a left hand. The right hand is really deadly, and we kill it quickly. When that hand dies, it spawns a bunch of earth elementals. Also, he occasionally targets someone in the raid with eye beams that will follow that person, killing everyone in his or her path.

This fight requires a combination of dps and AoE tanking. At the beginning of the fight, our goal is to help kill the right arm as quickly as possible. Fortunately, adds can't spawn when the arm is out, so we don't need to worry about any conflict there. I pop wings and help chew threw the arm as fast as I possibly can. The arm will periodically grab someone, even you, but there's really nothing you can do about that. It's a lot like the cauldron on Ignis. So, here we do what we do on Deconstructor, burn, burn. There's no real worry about stealing aggro as the arm has no aggro table.

When the arm dies is when things become tricky. He immediately spawns a bunch of "Rubble" which have point blank AoE attacks. I need to pick these up and fast. Since I know exactly where the rubbles will spawn, I have a Consecration waiting for them. Then I toss a shield and a glyphed Hammer of the Righteous. This usually cements aggro on them. If I missed one, I grab it with Exorcism or Hand of Reckoning. Do not use Righteous Defense. If you taunt an add targetting the main tanks, you will taunt Kologarn, he will Petrifying Breath and the entire raid will die.

The trick then is to pull them immediately away from the raid, because those AoE attacks will kill anyone standing too close. I then quietly go into a corner and toss out my usual threat cycle, prioritizing multi-target attacks. The mobs tend to die reasonably quickly, and I go dps the boss for a little bit until the arm respawns.

The really tricky part is if I get eyebeamed when I'm AoE tanking. This has only happened twice, but it can be absolutely deadly when it happens. Don't panic and be prepared. What I have written below is what I did the second time this happened. The first time, well...we won't mention that.

When this happens, you should be on the right side of the boss tanking a bunch of adds. If you're the target of the eyebeam, it will be very obvious, since you're entirely by yourself. If the eyebeams come after you, you are the target. The big issue is that not only am I dragging the eyebeam behind me, I am dragging five or six adds doing PBAoEs. I really don't want to drag those through the raid.

Since there is some space behind me, I turn and run away from the boss to his right along the edge of the chasm. Since I'm turning my back in an AoE situation, I pop Divine Protection here. This is good practice in general: if you need to turn your back on an attacking enemy, pop Divine Protection. I go about ten yards, and them start along the back wall toward the center of the room, planning to kite the eyebeams back and forth along the back wall. I also call out in vent, "It's on me. I'm at the back of the room. Stay back". Fortunately, the raid is used to staying away since the back of the room is where we usually kite the eye beams. Hopefully at this point, the dps are paying attention and are still AoEing down the mobs. The time I did this properly, the mobs died a little before the eyebeam wore off.

That's really the only tricky part, and there's a good chance it won't happen. Other than that, this fight is fairly straightforward.

Avenging Wrath

My favourite graphic in the game is the wings that appear on our back when we cast Avenging Wrath. It's that wonderful moment where we say, "I'm sorry, did you think I was some annoying little glowworm? I think you're making some sort of mistake here. I carry with me the celestial powers of an angel of Light! Place your little neck where I can see it and I'll behead you swiftly." As everyone knows, angel's wings are made of fire, and if you think that makes it hard to fly, just try and make fire go downwards. I'd say at least fifty-two point six percent of my reason for becoming a paladin rather than a warrior was that warriors can't grow wings.

However, aside from making us look positively awesome, Avenging Wrath presents quite a dilemma for the protection paladin. For one thing, like with any other class, we need to decide when to "blow our cooldowns". On the other hand, however, because of ret paladins abusing it, we can no longer use Avenging Wrath within thirty seconds of Divine Protection. Now, if you're a big scaredy cat like I usually am, this means that you might be tempted not to use Avenging Wrath for fear that you'll use it right when you needed your 50% damage reduction most. Much of our role involves staying alive. In fact, unlike other classes, when we die, it's often an automatic wipe. Wings are cool, but are they worth wiping the raid.

However, there are a number of occasions when I find Avenging Wrath quite helpful, and I pull my wings out and impress all my friends. They are:

1. On the pull. I find that if I'm going to die, it will be on the pull. However, I pop my trinkets right at the beginning for a little extra avoidance, and, in general, if I die here, it's because the healers have their assignments crossed or their cat is sitting on their keyboard. The extra 50% usually won't help. However, the extra 20% threat can be the difference between a miss wiping the raid and holding aggro. Plus, and this sounds strange, but having the paladin in front of you suddenly grow wings and throw a glowing shield tends to get people's attention. The extra second that I gain by distracting a healer from his Doritos can save a life here, and not necessarily mine.
2. When dpsing. Yes, it does happen. No, really. There are a lot of fights, Deconstructor being the biggest example, where I spend some time dpsing the boss. These tend to be fights that are dps races where I'm offtanking something, but not necessarily for the whole fight. In these cases, I'll pop wings when I can. I usually miss the bloodlusts at times like this, so it usually turns out that I just throw it up right away.
3. Bloodlust. Bloodlust is tricky. Yes, it is true that Bloodlust mainly gives us extra white damage, but have you ever noticed that all of a sudden your threat cycle gets all wonky? That's not a coincidence. Your global cooldown goes down and that means we get an extra instant attack per cycle. In fact, we get a little less than two, so if you're feeling lucky, squeeze something in there. Now we've got more choices of what to put in there. We can throw in an Exorcism or an Avenging Shield or a Hammer of Wrath or two. The extra damage isn't from the white damage - it's from the extra attack. Be ready to squeeze in the extra attacks in there.

Otherwise, though, I'm afraid I don't get a chance to use my wings. Losing access to Divine Protection when I might really need it simply isn't worth it unless I'm in some danger of losing threat or in a really tough dps race. If I die, everyone else dies, and if I get low, Divine Protection gives my healers the time to catch up. There's rarely a situation aside from the three listed about where I can justify losing access to Divine Protection for 20% extra threat.

However, I look forward to all the opportunities I can find to remind everyone that I have the power of a celestial warrior. Using Avenging Wrath as a protection paladin is a tricky business, but with the proper timing, it can become one of the staples of the awesome amount of burst threat we can do and the, well, pure awesomeness that is being a paladin.

The Great Hit Debate

Perhaps the position for which I have generated the most flack on maintankadin is my support of hit rating for protection paladins. Along with one or two other people, I am one of the biggest proponents of hit rating for a protection paladin, and I have raised much ire for holding this position. The topic is very interesting, as it covers a number of buried disputes about the nature of tanking.

Hit rating for paladin tanks is our second best threat stat, after strength. It also has no mitigation value of any kind. It is useful, however, for two things: burst threat and pickups.

Burst threat:
Every skill we have except Seal of Vengeance uses hit (including Consecration, oddly enough). On average, strength gives me more threat, and over time, it will give me more threat. However, the reliability of how much threat I can build up right away is affected by hit rating more than any other statistic. A whiff or two early on in the fight creates the real possibility of losing aggro to an impatient dps who gets off a lucky crit or two. This happens more often than we generally are willing to admit, and it is usually perceived as the dps's fault (which it is). However, if I can prevent a wipe, who cares whose fault the wipe would have been?

Pick-Ups:
Both of our taunts, Righteous Defense and Hand of Reckoning, as well as both of our ranged pick-up skills, Exorcism and Avenger's Shield, rely on hit rating. I am constantly picking up adds throughout a fight and there are a number of fights, like Razorscale or Hodir, that depend on perfect taunts. Other fights, like Auriaya, require me to threat adds with nasty damage increasing bonuses out of packs. In fact, the only fight in Ulduar I have seen that doesn't require me to pick up something or taunt something is Flame Leviathan.

The arguments against hit rating tend to come in three sorts: it isn't our job, it's just opinion and it's useless. All of these are interesting, because they aren't really about +hit rating directly, but reflect deeper disagreements about tanking as a whole.

"It isn't our Job":
This argument is summed up with something like: "It isn't our job. Our job is to maximize survivability and threat. Hit is worse at both than other comparable stats. Therefore, it is a bad stat"

The problem with this argument is that it makes some very odd assumptions about what our "job" is. The general mindset here is that what a "tank" does is stand perfectly still and tank big bad meanies using an ideal threat rotation. This is true for some fights, but for most fights it isn't true at all. Even main tanks need to share bosses through taunting (there are a few fights like this in Ulduar, like Hodir, Razorscale and Thorim, just off the top of my head). Maximizing average threat is also misplaced. It is only relevant in cases where we are threat capped, which are few and far between. Threat capping hasn't been an issue since 3.0, so trying to maximize threat is like trying to maximize overhealing.

Our "job" is whatever job we have in a given fight, which may even include things like dpsing when we aren't tanking (like of Deconstructor) and, usually, includes picking stuff up and saving the squishies. There is no "real" job for us.

"It's just opinion":
This argument is the result of a really simplistic epistemology that is all over internet forums: if it isn't measurable, it's just opinion. There's certainly some utility to this view for settling and focusing disputes, but it's simplistic, self-refuting and misleading for a number of reasons. It's simplistic, because when taken literally, it would mean that statements like, "Bill Clinton was president of the United States" is opinion. It's self-refuting, because the view that only measurable things are facts and everything else is mere opinion is, by its own criteria, mere opinion.

I'm most interested though in how it is misleading, especially in the context of tanking. "Measurable" doesn't mean "easily measurable" or "measured". EH, "time to live", threat and avoidance are easily measurable. There is a certain comfort to sticking with the "facts". However, dead squishies, wipes from resisted taunts and overenthusiastic hunters are also measurable, they are just not easily measurable, nor has anyone developed a program to measure them. I'm sure, actually, that some of the world's top guilds keep track of exactly this sort of thing, though they have probably not collated any of their data.

Even if one accepted that because the benefits of hit rating have not been measured, they are just opinion, one cannot therefore conclude that it is worthless. If the belief that hit rating is useful for tanking is just opinion, so is the belief that it is worthless. There is no default practical conclusion in the face of a lack of evidence: if I believe that a chest might have gold in it, I open it; if I believe it might be boobie-trapped, I don't. Our practical judgements are a constant juggling and guessing in the face of lack of evidence. However, pretending that because something's value has not been accurately weighed it is therefore worthless represents some serious confusion about the conclusions one can draw from the fact-opinion distinction (even if one were to accept it).

"It doesn't work":
This is the view I take most seriously and the reason why, though I have quite a bit of hit on my gear, I haven't gone out of my way to be threat capped. The argument works something like this: "There's no circimstances in which I really need hit rating, even for snap aggro. I don't lose aggro when tanking, even early on, and I have backup taunts when I need them".

I do take this view very seriously, but I think it is mistaken in the end. There are two parts for it, the snap aggro part and the pickup parts. For the snap aggro part, I will note that it can and does happen that impatient and "lucky"-critting dps pull something right at the beginning of a fight. It is usually a hunter, but I've seen mages do it. I have a tendency myself to not worry about something because it isn't my fault. However, when I started paying more attention, I noticed this was definitely happening.

The second part is the backup view. This is true in some contexts, and since both Hand of Reckoning and Righteous Defense are not on the global cooldown, they can be considered true backups when they are useable. However, since Naxxramas, almost all bosses are now tauntable. This means Righteous Defense is just too dangerous to use in a number of fights, including Auriaya, for example. It why they gave us Hand of Reckoning in the first place. Second, in a fight like Thorim, I am using both of these taunts every time they come off the GCD. I don't have "extra" taunts to waste on misses. Exorcism and Avenger's Shield aren't really backups, either, since they may not actually pick up aggro and they are on the GCD.

So, I believe in both cases where hit rating is said not to really be useful, it is.

All in all, then, there's really a lot of content to the debate about hit rating, including some rather deep issues about the nature of tanking and even of knowledge. I've presented here the most comprehensive explanation I've done of my position. I hope you've enjoyed.

Staying In Business: Eanin's Gem Emporium

I promised a few posts on WoW business, so I thought for this one I'd tell something of a story. If you're from my server, you probably know a little bit of it. Of course, you probably won't share my actual situation, but it's about how to take a crippling business situation and turn it around into an opportunity. Something happened on my server that drove almost every other jewelcrafter out of business. If I hadn't thought outside of the box, it would have driven me out of business, too, and my posts would be all about alchemy. However, I considered my options and managed to actually profit off of what would otherwise have been the end of my business, like it was of just about everyone else's

This is about how I managed to keep my jewelcrafting business afloat and even highly successful in the face of a...highly enthusiastic other player. This other player had the amazing ability to be online nearly 24 hours per day in Orgrimmar, cornering the jewelcrafting market. If you put up an auction, he would immediately take his down and repost it for a silver less. I have no idea where he got such stamina. He must have had endless energy and time (which must be the explanation, correct?). However, what happened is that it became impossible to sell any jewels unless you were him. You simply couldn't have the lowest priced auction for more than a couple of minutes before he undercut by a silver.

This drove everyone else out of business. However, I sat back and thought about it: how can I keep myself going in the face of this enthusiasm? I'm a casual player who only really does crafting every day or two. I don't have time to stand here by the auction house reposting my auctions for hours. So, brainstorming I thought to myself, "Wait a second, he's only undercutting by a silver, right? What if I can offer more than that, but outside the aution house?".

So, I came up with the solution: rebates! I'll offer a rebate to anyone who buys my gems in the mail. Not everyone will know about my rebates, so he can't defeat this strategy using his...enthusiasm. I'll offer 10% back by mail. People who know about the rebate will buy my gems because he's only undercutting me by a silver, anyway. But, he can't start undercutting me by more than 10% because then he'd lose all that money on the people who don't know about my rebate. So, he's stuck and I'll sell my gems.

In order to do this, I needed two things: advertising and a reputation. I put up a post on the boards, explaining my offer. I also put together a simple macro I pressed whenever I was in a city:

"Eanin's Gem Emporium™ is now offering a 10% REBATE on all rare cut gems! That's right! Buy a rare cut gem (including metas) from Eanin on the AH and you'll receive 10% GOLD BACK by mail! At Eanin's, the most important sparkle is in your smile!"

The goal was to be funny and direct. Of course, I was flamed immediately in /trade chat, largely because it is filled with angry sociopaths. It was all right. I didn't really expect people to believe it at first. However, then I started sending out the rebates. It was a trickle at first, because it was just those I could slip past our enthusiastic friend. However, as it went on, I picked up many customers. People started defending me in trade chat and sending me "thank you" e-mails. One day, I remember after some bitter loner attacked me in trade chat, someone replied, "No, he pays them. He's a good businessman". That made me really proud.

Within a couple of weeks, I had a thriving jewelcrafting business, while everyone else was bankrupt. Because Mr. Enthusiasm had basically created a monopoly, prices were very high, and 10% less of monopoly prices was actually quite a bit of gold. I managed to turn this situation into one that actually made quite a bit of money, developed brand recognition and a reputation as a good businessman on the server.

When our enthusiastic friend suddenly and completely disappeared without a trace (I suppose because he found some other hobby), I cancelled the rebate, letting my customers know both on the forums and in /trade. While I enjoyed the recognition, at the end of the day, the rebate was a business decision. However, it remains one of my proudest moments as an online businessman and a good example of how to take a tough business environment and turn it into profit.

Indestructible Potions

I thought I'd put together a post about one of my favourite, and I believe highly underused, consumables in the game. It is called the "Indestructible Potion" and is made from two Icethorn and an Imbued Vial. What it does is increase your armor by 3500 for 2 minutes. However, what isn't on the potion is that it can actually increase your armor by 4 minutes if used properly during a fight. Given that we really don't have any other potions to use, I try to pop at least one of these on every fight that's remotely hard. Remember that time you died to a 50 health overkill? This would have saved you.

How then do I use this twice during a fight? Can't you only use one potion per fight? Actually, there's a workaround that people used to use with resistance potions. The once-per-fight potion cooldown doesn't kick in unless you are in combat. What this means is that you can drink one of these things before a fight begins and then drink another one during the fight when the potion wears off. That gives you a grand total of four minutes of 3500 extra armor, though the first two minutes need to be at the beginning of the fight (and you have to remember!). However, 3500 armor is huge, representing over a 9% reduction in physical damage. It can and often will make the difference between life and death.

It's too bad, in a lot of ways, that we've gotten out of the habit of using potions. They cost about 4 or 5 gold each to make, meaning at most it's 8 or 10 gold per attempt. That's about the same cost as food, and it makes more of a difference in survivability than most food does. I think we've gotten out of the habit of using these kinds of performance-enhancing potions since the potion changes in 3.0. Before then, I'd easily chew through 25 Free Action Potions in Mount Hyjal and 20 Super Mana Potions in a ZA bear run. Casters chained mana pots throughout battles. It was expected. Now potions tend to be forgotten about when players think of the consumables they will bring.

However, surviving really is our job, and these potions are a bargain. If I've upgraded a piece of gear lately for 1000 gold, that's over 100 attempts of double potting. I guarantee that 3500 armor gives more survivability than any possible gear upgrade. Being a tank is expensive and raiding is expensive, but it's part of the job, and every time the raid wipes, it costs money in repairs, time, food buff and elixirs. Indestructible potions are far and away the best performance-enhancing potion available to tanks, and I am very happy that they are around.

By the way, as someone else noted on wowhead, these potions are, in fact, destructible.

Ardent Defender as an Effective Health Bonus

This is a modified version of an old post of mine from maintankadin, but it's one of my favourite bits of theorycrafting, so I thought it merited a post here. For those of you who aren't paladins, Ardent Defender (AD) is a talent that reduces all damage we take by 30% when our health is below 35%. Effective Health (EH) is our heath adjusted for armor bonuses, and was created as a way of considering worst case scenarios and how many hits we could take before we died a horrible, bloody death when we fail to avoid a single attack. This post was designed to see how much of an equivalent to EH we are given by Ardent Defender in various worst-case scenarios.

1-2) For any mob that can kill us in one or two hits, it is useless.

3) For any mob that can kill us in three hits, the third hit would be affected by AD. So, in order to kill us:

x+x+0.7x=100%

2.7x=100%

x=37%

That means that, in order to kill us in three hits, a mob would need to do 37% damage to us on each hit.

This translates into: 37%*3=111%

So, for a mob that can kill us in three hits, AD is like a 11% EH bonus.

4) For a mob that can kill us in four hits, the fourth hit would be affected by AD:

x+x+x+0.7x=100%

3.7x=100%

x=27%

27%*4=108%

5) For a mob that can kill us in five hits: x+x+x+x+0.7x=100%

4.7x=100%

x=21.3%

21.3*5=106.5%

Note that 21.3%*3 is very close to 65% (it's 63.9%), so if one of the first hits is a little larger, the last two hits will both be affected by AD:

x+x+x+0.7x+0.7x=100%

4.4x=100% x=22.7%

22.7%*5=113.5%

6) For a mob that can kill us in six hits, though, the last two hits will definitely be affected by AD: x+x+x+x+0.7x+0.7x=100%

5.4x=100%

x=18.5%

18.5%*6=111%

So, assuming we get hit by a mob for about the same amount (not exactly a fair assumption, but true in many situations), the bonus EH from AD is:

2 hits: 0%

3 hits: 11%

4 hits: 8%

5 hits: 6.5%/13.5%

6 hits: 11%

Strictly speaking, of course, this isn't an EH bonus in the same way that Block Value isn't EH. However, in a "worst case scenario", we can consider what would happen if we never avoided an attack, which is the purpose of calculating EH in the first place. Therefore, one can think of AD as being an EH bonus in the same way one can consider BV an EH bonus. In a worst case scenario, it adds to our survivability like effective health. Like BV, the amount of bonus scales with the number of hits we take before we die (though the bonus is a curve rather than a straight line).

Ardent Defender is one reason why we are such resilient tanks right now. For a long time, our lower hit points and then our lower damage reduction were justified by appaling to Ardent Defender. For mobs that couldn't kill us in two hits, this was true, but for those that could, it was useless. Now, however, we've been given the health and damage reduction but kept Ardent Defender. This had the effect of making us really hard to kill.

The Hidden Benefit of Armor

Last night, I got my Saronite Plated Leggings. I've long been a supporter of armor in order to increase survivability, and part of it has to do with a hidden benefit that doesn't show up in the EH calculations. For those of you unsure of the lingo, "EH" is effective health, which is the amount of health we have, adjusted for armor. It is used to model our time to live in a "worst case scenario" in which we do not avoid any hits. There is some debate about whether or not to include block value on a block-capped paladin in this number (for various reasons), though for the purposes of this post, I will not.

It would seem, then, that a 2% reduction in incoming damage and a 2% increase in armor are the same, are they not? For example, let's say I increase my armor in such a way that I move from 50% mitigation to 51% mitigation. I've reduced my incoming damage by 2%. My other option is to increase my health by 2%, say from 30k to 30.6k health. It would seem on the face of it that there really is no decision to be made here. In one case, I increase my EH by reducing all incoming damage by 2%, while in the other case, I increase my EH by increasing my health by 2%. My EH goes up at the same rate in either case.

However, armor provides a hidden benefit that isn't normally considered: it increases the value of all healing. Why is this? Let's say that I choose the armor over the health. Now, when I am healed, I am healed for the same amount of health. However, I am actually healed for 2% more effective health, because each of my points of actual health are worth more effective health. My effective health is my actual health multiplied by my armor benefit. When my armor benefit goes up, my actual health is worth more EH, and so every heal is actually worth more EH.

Therefore, in a physical damage fight, armor can be considered not only as a bonus to our EH, but also to a bonus to our healing. In fact, the effect of 2% more armor reduction is exactly the same as a 2% increase of actual health plus a 2% bonus to healing. This hidden benefit is why healers find us easier to heal as we gear up. If we were simply increasing our stamina as we geared up, it would take just as much mana to heal us, even if we died less quickly. However, because we increase our armor, the heals our healers put on us are actually worth more EH than if we were simply to increase our actual health.

Armor does have a few problems. It is over-budgeted, in the sense that we would need about 50k health before the EH gained catches up to stamina in item cost, and it is worthless against magic damage, which splashes all over the place in Ulduar. However, in a strictly physical fight in which one must choose between health and armor to increase EH, armor wins out every time.

My Shields: A Tribute, Part Two

Today I'll conclude my tribute to those shields that have protected me through the dangers of Azeroth and Outland.

Illidari Runeshield - Lots of paladins wanted the Bulwark of Azzinoth, but not me. Back in the old days, our threat was all about spell power, of all things, and this shield was probably the best spell damage shield in the game. The Antonidas shield had a little more armor and spell power, but substantially less stamina with some wasted points on crit. This shield looked like it was custom made for us protection paladins. Plus, it looked great. The night I got it, I spent a few hours soloing the quest for the Green Trophy Tabard of the Illidari, so that I could match. The look lasted for the rest of TBC for me, and made me look truly unique, setting me apart from the other paladins and tanks. It was also nice, since it gave me the opportunity to see the generosity of a guildmate. The Runeshield was a trash drop in Black Temple, and we were using a /roll system from the trash in Mount Hyjal for the sake of speed. Another paladin, one of our casual raiders, won the roll but passed it to me. I was really grateful, and I've always been impressed with his generosity.

Barricade of Eternity - While I did get a Titansteel Shield Wall in Wrath of the Lich King, I had it for about three minutes before I picked up my favourite looking shield of the expansion so far, the Barricade of Eternity. Some of the other officers and I went in to fiddle around with 10-man Malygos so that we could get ready for the larger 25-man version with the guild. After a couple hours of figuring it, we finally got the blue dragon down and this awesome shield dropped. Its stats are, well, terrible. Expertise is awful for us and parry is our worst avoidance stat. However, this shield looks just incredible and it was rare to boot. While Naxx was getting pugged by half the server, virtually no one was running 10-man Malygos and so I've only ever seen maybe five of these. When I got an upgrade in Naxx, I stopped using this shield, of course, but I still love the look and we were companions for a couple months.

Hero's Surrender - Once this shield dropped, the Barricade of Eternity found its way into the bank. This shield is still the best avoidance shield available, and thanks to a gearing error on Blizzard's part, was easily the best tanking shield in the game before 3.1. It has the perfect combination of stats for avoidance, dodge, defense and parry, and it drops off of the only boss that actually hits a darn in Naxxramas, Patchwerk (though I got mine off of Gluth). The only problem is that it is hideous. After using the massive Barricade of Eternity for months, dropping down to this little thing felt like I wasn't even using a shield. Plus, they got its shape kind of wrong. It's round, to the point where it looks almost like a bucket. It reminds me of one of those skull candy baskets that kids carry around on Hallowe'en. When I found out the stats on Wall of Terror were changing, I couldn't wait to get this thing off of my arm.

Wall of Terror - This is still my shield, and will be my shield for all of Ulduar most likely. It's kind of a mix of Barricade of Eternity and Hero's Surrender. It has the size and shape of the former and the skull of Hero's Surrender. At the end of the day, it has a nice, creepy look perfectly suited to Naxxramas. It looks like a shield of dark bone with a ghostly face looking through. It's also huge, which is appropriate for a shield, though it required me to get a haircut because of clipping issues. Somehow, when Wrath came out, they messed up the statistics. Instead of 94 stamina, like it was supposed to have, it had 63. They fixed it on test, but despite this shield being ilevel 226, the ilevel 213 Hero's Surrender was a better item. Finally, in 3.1, this shield got its appropriate amount of stamina and Wall of Terror became my full-time shield, with the exception of a couple of full avoidance fights. For paladins, having a couple dodge+block rating items is great for keeping at the block cap without sacrificing too many stats, and I'll be using this shield for a long time.

In the end, that I will be using the Wall of Terror so long is the point of this little editorial section. While, strictly speaking, the Boreal Guard from hard mode ten-made Hodir is the best in slot shield for us right now, given that I basically never run ten-mans, let alone hard modes means that I will never have one. Plus, it's a side-grade at best and it is actually slightly underbudgeted even counting the sockets. For 25-man raiding, on the other hand, they haven't put in a shield upgrade anywhere in Ulduar, even in the hard modes! The best 25-man raiding shield still drops from Kel'Thuzad and even if one day we kill Algalon, it will be with the Wall of Terror on my arm. This is really unfortunate, because the titan-themed graphics on Ulduar gear that I really like don't really match the horror-them of Naxxramas. It looks like Wall of Terror and I will be friends for a year or more. Guess it's time to give it a name!

My Shields: A Tribute, Part One

For a tank, no item we have stands out more than our shield. It's what protects us from the enemies around us and strikes those around us immediately with its design. It's both our most important piece of armor and our strongest fashion statement. So, like most paladins, I have had a number of good friends, and it is time I gave a tribute to all of those shields that have served me so well over the two years I have been a protection paladin. I will start with level 70, since I levelled so quickly I honestly don't remember those that came before. However, one levelling shield will get a special mention.

Petrified Lichen Guard - The minute I reached level 62, I went out to Zangarmarsh and did as many Sporeggar quests as I could for this beautiful little item. I then spend about 500g (a fortune at the time) on getting a Felsteel Shield Spike made for it by the only person I knew of who could make one at the time, my guildmistress. Although I outgrew it very quickly for maintanking, the "PLG" served me well right up until the day that Wrath came out when farming. Its reactive proc made it simply the best farming shield, well, ever.


Shield of the Wayward Footman - For those who know my old guide, this shield was always a cornerstone. I picked one up as soon as I could because it helped give a paladin something that was such a challenge to us, but came with such ease to warriors: uncrushability. Back in the good old days, when the game was hard, unless a paladin was able to reach 102.4% avoidance+block, we could be crushed, even by the first boss in Karazhan. Since getting there was nearly impossible without Kara gear, we were stuck, except for one saving grace: block rating. This shield had loads of it, and served me very well for my first couple of months in Karazhan and, if it didn't exist, I'm honestly not sure that I would ever have been able to tank the place.


Crest of the Sha'tar - I spent weeks farming heroic Mechanar for this horrid but awesome little shield. Of course, the Footman shield was better for reaching uncrushable, but let's face it, its armor stank. Through my weeks of farming Mechanar, I managed finally to get myself my first ever epic shield. It was terribly ugly and honestly, I hated the grind so much that I ended up actually kind of hating the shield as well. However, it was epic, and the difference was night and day. All of a sudden, I was tough. Of course, I could have bought the Shield of Coldarra, which was largely the same, but this was before badges dropped in Karazhan, so getting a rep shield let me spend my badges on other tank gear.

Aldori Legacy Defender - The Holy Grail of T4 tanking content, I won this shield over two other tanks on a roll in Gruul's lair. To give you a sense of how stupidly awesome this shield was, it had 500 more armor than the Shield of Impenetrable Darkness that dropped in Karazhan, the Bulwark of the Amani Empire didn't exist yet, and there were no tanking shields that dropped in t5 content. It was also a 10% drop from Gruul, an annoying cave that required putting together a 25-man raid for only two bosses. This was back when the designers had decided that shields should be a prestige item and this shield was definitely prestigious. It also looked frickin' awesome. This shield will never be forgotten.

Bulwark of the Amani Empire - When Zul'Aman finally came out, lots of people wanted the bears. "Lots of people" included everyone but the tanks, who didn't want the bears, but wanted the finally created, reasonably-accessible, t5-level Bulwark of the Amani Empire. As I already had the ALD, I wasn't as excited as most people, but it didn't stop me from wanting one of these babies, especially for my increasingly well-developed block set. Our guild's main warrior tanks used this shield all the way through t6 content, largely because Kaz'rogal hated them. In most fights, it was a slight upgrade over the ALD, though I still used the ALD whenever I was tanking anything that hit really hard, since it was a better avoidance shield. So, when it finally dropped, I happily grabbed it up. Plus, of course, for us blood elfs, the green feather set was impossible to beat. What's the green feather set? Glad you asked:











Stay tuned for part two, where my next four shields receive their due praise, and I provide a disappointed editorial on the unfortunate shield situation in Ulduar.

Strategy: Razorscale

This is the second in my series of strategy tips for protection paladins, following the one I did on XT-002 Deconstructor. In this one, I'll be discussing Razorscale, the armor-plated dragon early on in the Ulduar instance. On this fight, my role is to be one of the tanks handling the massive number of adds that spawn throughout the first phase, then to be the second tank on the grounding phase. As usual, I'll just discuss what I do in this fight. Your mileage will vary, depending on your role.

First, gear. My general gearing strategy for any fight is to gear for the toughest part of the fight. For example, on Deconstructor, I gear for dps, since the timer is the real enemy. For this fight, despite the fact that I will only be actually tanking the dragon for about fifteen seconds, that it the part I gear for. At the end of the day, I'm not too worried about threat in the first phase of the fight. I am, however, worried about getting one-shot by a breath during those fifteen seconds. I use an assortment of my normal tank gear, plus a few extra items I've picked up for stamina. I use both my Essence of Gossamer and my Monarch Crab, for example. Unbuffed, I'm running a little under 33k in this set.

We divide the ground up into three sections, and each tank takes a portal. My job is to take the "middle" portal when the dwarves come up. This is a little harder than it sounds, since the portals actually appear just about anywhere and at random times. Sometimes, two portals will appear one behind the other, and neither is really the "middle" one. At other times, one will crop up over on the "north" side of the room, be picked up by the "north" tank, and then another one will pop up even further north. The trick here is just vent and good communication between the tanks. I usually just say in vent, "I'll take the close one" or "I'll take the new one" whenever something awkward like this happens. Pickups are easy. If I get to the portal before the mobs spawn, I drop Consecration. Otherwise, I use Avenger's Shield.

For this part of the fight, I use Seal of Righteousness, not Corruption. Why? If something gets away, your dps might want to use some form of CC in order to protect themselves. However, if I've DoTted the mob, they can't do it. It's a little less dps and threat, but there's no reason not to do something a little more safely if it doesn't really hurt anyone. During the landing phase, also, enterprising mages will sometimes throw a sheep on a stray add so I can join in the dps fun. They can't do that if I've DoTted up the mob.

The kill order on the mobs is Sentinel, Watcher, Guardian, three synonymously named mobs with not nearly synonymous enough powers. The Sentinels need to die fast and they whirlwind. Since the whole raid will focus on them, I'll shield slam these guys right away for a nice threat lead. The Watchers and the Guardians are next. Watchers can be tricky to move, because they are casters, so I usually just fight the mobs where they spawn or right after the Avenger's Shield silence wears off. Guardians are wimps and aren't really dangerous to me.

The key to killing Razorscale, though, is getting him to 50% in two landing phases. As soon as he lands, my job is to dps, unless I'm still fighting a sentinel or a watcher. Dragging a sentinel into the melee is just an instagib for everyone in your path, so don't do it. Watchers cast chain lightning. If I only have sentinels on me (or nothing at all), I pop wings, Seal of Corruption and dps away. Sure, my dps is terrible in my dragon gear, but it's still over 2k and even 3k with wings, so that's nothing to sneeze at. Everything helps here, including me. If I get a chance to dps, I will. At the end of the burn phase, you get knocked back. Locate yourself in a spot so that you get knocked right back into your original taking position.

Okay, now he's down to 50%. What now? Because my threat is so high, I try not to do too much dps until it is my turn to tank. I'll throw up a JoL for healing and a hammer or two, but I won't shield slam. In principle, I could drop Righteous Fury for this part, but if something goes wrong, I want to be able to taunt immediately with it up, so I go into "plink" mode. Don't forget to put Seal of Corruption back up, though. The first tank, a druid, turns him clockwise, so I try to stay to his left, just out of range of the breath. When he calls for my turn, I immediately move to where he is standing (I don't just taunt) and taunt the dragon.

The trick with Razorscale is that he breathes and then leaves blue fire on the ground. Fire is bad. So, every time after he breathes, I move to the left so that I'm standing just out of the fire. It reminds me a little of the Illidan adds, actually. He also casts "Fuse Armor" on my, which reduces my armor and movement speed by 20%. As you can guess, this is bad. Once I get a third stack, I call out for the next tank and he taunts off of me. If I survive the transition (which I often don't), then I go back into plinking mode for the rest of the fight, doing as much damage as I can without pulling aggro. I don't take RF off as even a few seconds of extra tanking if something goes wrong can save the fight.

That's the whole thing. I hope you have found this useful and that it will help you in tanking this fun and interesting fight.

Power Auras

I've just discovered a little mod called "Power Auras". I know it's been around for a while, but I'm generally mod-averse and I've never really needed it before. However, with the changes to Sacred Shield and Divine Plea, all of a sudden, I needed a mod that would easily keep track of whether or not I have certain buffs on me, so that I can recast them in battle without having to constantly look through my buffs in the corner to try to find them. A couple of people suggested power auras, so I decided to have a look.

The mod is really very useful and one thing I like about it is unobtrusive. Basically, I can make auras or pictures that pop up around my character when certain triggers happen, including things like gaining aggro, having a certain percentage of health or, as I originally intended it, losing or gaining certain buffs. Since these are all picture and sound cues, you can customize them so that they fit nicely into the graphics of the game as a whole. For example, you can make a runed, translucent, purple circle around your character that fits right into the game graphics as a whole.

At first, I tried to make them too unobtrusive. For instance, I had little yellow triangles come out of my shoulders when Divine Plea was down and had little leaves under my feet for when Art of War was up for my ret spec. The problem was that I couldn't see the auras at all under the absolute mass of spells flying around. I imagine the little auras are nice for hunters, mages and healers, but as melee, whether tanking or dps, I'm always at the centre of half a million different spell details. I simply couldn't see them.

However, what gave me the right idea was the crossed swords I decided to put over my head when my target was at <20% health. This was made so that I could know when to use Hammer of Wrath, rather than rely on the little bit of scrolling combat text I only see once. It was really visible, and I decided to repeat that pattern with my other auras, such as when Sacred Shield and Divine Plea aren't up. That worked like a charm. I'm now immediately aware when my Sacred Shield goes down so that I can refresh it as well as thing like Divine Plea. I also added a couple of big symbols for when Hammer of Wrath is available and when my health drops below 35%.

There are a couple of annoying things about the mod. First, there doesn't seem to be any way to disable an aura without deleting it. This is a bit annoying, since I need different things when I'm in my two specs. For instance, as prot, I want to know when Divine Plea is up, but as ret I only care when it is available. There's no way to simply change or disable a mod and the mod has no way of knowing which spec I'm in. So, when I'm ret, I have the little "Divine Plea isn't up" picture most of the time. The second problem is that there's no volume control. I use a big red lion picture to let me know when my health is low. I also wanted to attach a lion roar so that I get an auditory cue. However, try as I might, there was no way to change the volume and the lion's roar is completely lost in the background noise.

Overall, then, this is a very useful mod. I can see it being useful in other contexts and for other classes as well. For instance, I could use it on my hunter to warn me when Serpent Sting has dropped or I could use it on my warrior to let me know when Battle Shout has fallen off. The ability to know when health has dropped low without always looking up to the corner is useful in its own right, even if the sound effect is largely useless. I look forward to using this fun and flexible mod in the future.

Making Gold

I'm rather wealthy in the game of World of Warcraft. I've bought the vendor mount and just about every epic I ever wanted and given to my guild besides. I'm now working on my mini-pet collection, which I bring out against matching enemies (Azure Whelpling for Malygos; Dark Whelpling for Sartharion, etc.). Moreover, I do it with very little effort; I make about 1500-2k gold per 45-minute session. A lot of the time I'm asked how I did it, and my usual response is "Jewelcrafting", but this isn't quite true. Or rather, it's like asking someone why they are such a good athlete and having them answer, "By running". It kind of misses the point of the question.

In order to explain how I've managed to make this money, I'd like to address two mistakes people make about the economy in general. The first mistake is to think that the market is insane, rife with mistakes that are easily exploited by the clever auctioneer. The second mistake is to think the market is perfect, crawling with competitors ready to outcompete you immediately. Neither is true, and they both undermine the ability to profit.

The first mistake leads to the belief that the auction house is really about buying low and selling high. There is definitely money to be made this way; I bought my first epic mount with this strategy. However, the problem with this strategy is that it depends on other people's mistakes. Sometimes, you'll get really lucky and you'll notice others making mistakes. Other times, though, you'll not find a single mistake anywhere or get beaten to the mistake by someone else. Other people try to generate mistakes by monopolizing a section of the market. They'll remember the 30g they made on their first golden fishstick and forget about the 150g they lost on the rest. In general, monopolizing leads others to undercut you and you're stuck with a ton of useless stock. Ironically, you make money for other people doing this, but rarely for yourself.

The second mistake, however, is thinking that the economy is perfect and that every margin has been squeezed away by an infinite number of instantaneous competitors. This simply isn't true in WoW (it's not true in the real world either, but that's another story). There are tons of opportunities to make money by using crafting or even just little things like an import-export business. Yes, you will have competition, but they're trying to make a profit too, and will tend to drop out if the margins drop too low. In fact, entrepreneurship is in short supply and is the most valuable thing in WoW.

What I would say is that there are two tips for generating wealth in World of Warcraft:

• Generate Wealth
• Think Exponentially

By generate wealth, I mean that you should do something genuinely useful. Then people are paying you money for the service you have provided. Buying low and selling high doesn't really generate any wealth, at least not directly. It's a zero-sum game, like poker. However, production is a win-win game, where you gain the profit and the buyer gains the generated and now useful product. As long as you're producing wealth, while you might have competition, you are actually generating your own profits by generating things that are valuable.

By thinking exponentially, I mean that you should think in terms of how you can multiply your investment, not really think of how much profit you can make. Don't think, "I can make 100g by doing x", but "I can get back 130% on my investment by doing x". Try to find industries where you can throw two thousand gold at it in a sitting and make 150% back. When you multiply, rather than add, you generate more wealth in the long run. When you start to act in this way, you end up actually increasing your profits very quicly and with a miminum of invested time.

Those are my tips for making gold. I've been playing the game for two years, and discovered what I think is a foolproof philosophy. In fact, there are tons of other industries I'd like to play around with. It's too bad I can't find more things to spend my gold on.

Strategy: XT-002 Deconstructor

I thought I'd put together a few little guides on how to tank various fights in Ulduar. These guides will be completely first-person. I'll just go through what I do and how I do it, and the reasons I do it throughout. On this particular fight, I'm one of the offtanks, which means that my job is to tank the Pummellers. Of course, that's so easy it's not even worth mentioning. My real job, like everyone else's, is to dps the boss. The enrage timer on this fight is extremely tight, so the goal is to squeeze as much dps as you possibly can.

First: gear and buffs. For gear, I wear my block/threat set. It's basically every bit of block rating gear I've picked up since Wrath began, which means at this point, everything but hands (since they never dropped for me) and a second ring (since it doesn't exist). Darkmoon Card: Greatness is huge here. It's both threat and block value. Otherwise, my set's a little under 2k unbuffed block value and over 3k unbuffed ap. For buffs, I use a Dragonfin Filet (the strength food) and a Flask of Endless Rage. There's no need to be fancy here, and you actually take more damage from the tantrum the more hitpoints you have.

So, when the fight begins, I take off Righteous Fury. This is important. There's no tank who can hold aggro from me with Righteous Fury when I have my threat set on. I run in behind the boss and start thwacking away. I pop wings early in this fight, since otherwise I won't get full use of them. It'd be nice to get the extra damage from bloodlust, but I won't be there for the full heart phase anyway. Then, it's the usual threat rotation. Seal is Corruption.

At some point, he will drop his heart. A quick tab targets it for me. Then I swivel my camera around so I can see both of the heaps of trash on my side (we have another add tank for the other side) and keep dpsing away on the boss. At some point, a Pummeller will spawn in one of the scap heaps. At that point, I throw up Righteous Fury, which I will keep up for the rest of the fight. I run up to the Pummeller, throw my shield, then exorcism, then judgement, then Shield of Righteousness. Assuming he is surrounded by Scrapbots, I'll also drop a Consecration. If there's any Boombots around, I stay as far away as I can and save the Judgement and ShoR for when I get back.

Now there's a little bit of a tricky part. I pull the Pummeller in such a way that he's right on top of the Deconstructor so that I can dps both while still blocking the Pummeller's attacks. At this point, unless I missed my shield slam, I've cemented aggro, so I go back to targetting the Deconstructor. The main tank should have enough of an aggro lead now that I won't catch him (though I usually end the fight at ~90% of the main tank's aggro so be careful). Between Consecrates and Hammers of the Righteousness, I can hold aggro pretty easily on the Pummeller without ever targetting it again.

Then it's just rinse and repeat. There are a couple tricky bits. Of course there are the bombs. When that happens, I just spin and run away. Don't back out. Pummellers can actually hit pretty hard from behind, but it's better than blowing up the raid. A healer will probably get you, and if not, use your Divine Protection. Then go back and reposition the Pummeller like you did before. The second tricky bit is that, on the second phase, you may end up with two or even three pummellers. That's okay - it's why you have your block set. Just position all of them and go back to dpsing.

That's the whole thing. Remember of course to run away when you have the bomb. Watch your aggro, because a paladin in a threat set and Righteous Fury will steal aggro. Remember to keep Divine Plea up, since you can't dps without it. Tantrums will get most of your mana back, but that's not enough. Pop wings whenever you can; don't save them for the heart. Keep focussed.

As I do more bosses in Ulduar I'll post more of these little strategy guides.

Sacred Shield, How I Love Thee

Sacred Shield is one of those little abilities that most protection paladins forget about, but is one that makes us unique and even more durable than we already are. It's a thirty second or one minute ability (depending on whether you talented it) that procs a little damage shield whenever you get hit, at most every six seconds. It's basically free EH that gets added to all the EH we already have. As priests have known for years, but never tell anyone, damage absorption rarely overheals, because it is pre-emptive. The only way it wouldn't get used is if I don't take any damage for ten straight seconds, which is highly unlikely.

The reason most protection paladins forget about it is that we were so used to holy paladins casting it on us for so long. Since it's thirty seconds, holy paladins would often cycle through the tanks, popping one on each. In fact, if you have a holy paladin healing you, you shouldn't cast it, because it overwrites (as far as I can tell) and theirs is better than yours. So, we largely forgot about it. I'd throw it up in instances and occasionally ten-mans when there isn't a holy paladin, but otherwise, it was unused.

Patch 3.1 changed all that, though it didn't change most of our habits. Now, paladins can only throw up one sacred shield at a time. That means, unless you have a paladin directly assigned to you, you're not getting it. Finding out who is healing me is why I hang out in the healing channel, and it's even more important that it used to be. It is now our responsibility to shield ourselves and if we're not doing it, we're missing out on one of our best abilities.

We can talent the ability too, so it is less of an annoyance. As I've mentioned in other posts, little 30 second cooldowns are generally annoying, but we can talent it to 1 minute, which also improves our absorption and our Divine Sacrifice ability to boot. This one is strong enough that I don't really mind it, and I've got a nice little macro I use so I can either cast it on myself or choose a focus for it in cases where I want to throw it on someone else:

/cast [target=focus] Sacred Shield; [target=player] Sacred Shield

Overall, then, Sacred Shield is a wonderful ability, exactly the kind that a tank needs. Unless a holy paladin is assigned to heal me, having a reactive shield gives me more survivability in any fight where I won't be one-shot, which, as far as I can tell, is all of them.

Ulduar: The Return of the Block Set

I like being right. From all t5 content onwards, there were several fights where having a solid, block and block value set were very useful for progression. In fact, it was our niche, to the point where guilds would recruit a protection paladin just for the trash in Hyjal. And AoE tanking was fun. There was something pretty awesome about having 25 elites thwacking at you, futilely trying to get through your awesome shield.

Wrath brought two things. First, we weren't the only AoE tanks anymore. To be honest, that's neither here nor there. If other tanks want to AoE tank, more power to them. It doesn't affect me. Second, though, Wrath had very few AoE tank fights. There were adds on Sartharion and there was the dreary trash on Gothik, and that was it. A set was nice to have on Loatheb. However, let's face it, even if it had AoE fights, Naxx was so easy we really didn't need separate sets for anything, ever.

Not to be deterred, I picked up a hell of a block set in Naxxramas at great cost on the presumption that it might be useful again in Ulduar, and I was not disappointed. So far, Razorscale, Decontructor, Kolargarn, Freya and Thorim can make great use of a block/threat set. Deconstructor is one of those fights where I'm tanking only sometimes, so I need to max out the dps I can do and block value is great for that. The others all have swarms of waves that make my healer's job much easier if I can block the damage. I don't know the fights past this point yet, but the trash is getting hard enough that a proper trash set is proving beneficial in several spots. All in all, then, I'm quite happy that I have this set and I've even upgraded my belt and ring to new ilevel 226 block gear.

For a while in Naxx, I was scratching my head as to why there was block value on anything. Most of the fights were vanilla relics in which a boss hits a single tank real hard. It was like a whole aspect of tanking had been forgotten about. With Ulduar, this aspect is coming back, and I couldn't be happier for it.

Naxxramas: Good Riddance

The big mistake with Karazhan was that it created a 10-man bottleneck for 25-man raiding. Guilds collapsed, reformed and recollapsed as a result of this bizarre decision to make everyone complete a 10-man dungeon multiple times for months before they would be plausibly geared enough for 25-man raiding.

However, while there was a mistake in the general progression of raiding in TBC, Karazhan itself was a beautiful, well-designed, well thought-out dungeon. All of the fights were very interesting, if not unique, and the zone itself was absolutely breathtaking, featuring an eerie, Gothic quality that will not soon be forgotten. It was rich with lore, and despite the frustration of its serving as a bottleneck, I took two characters to exalted with Violet Eye with few complaints.

For Wrath of the Lich King, on the other hand, they decided to have Naxxramas as their starting raid dungeon. Naxxramas, as people know, was the last dungeon of "vanilla Wow" before TBC came out. It came out only a few months before the expansion, and was largely lost in the shuffle. Less than 5% of the player base ever got to see it. So, that the designers didn't want all that work to go to waste is understandable.

The problem was, as an opening dungeon, it was a disaster, for two reasons. First, it looked horribly dated. In fact, it looked exactly like what it was, recycled Undercity skins in big, empty rooms. While Karazhan blew us all away with its beautiful new graphics, Undercity was perhaps the ugliest place in the entire game. After going through beautiful new heroics like Halls of Stone, to then spend months in barren rooms was a disappointment, to say the least.

Second, it was too easy. Karazhan was the perfect difficulty level. All the fights were challenging, but not impossible. Curator was a real dps gear check, but all the fights and even the trash needed to be learned and ultimately mastered. On the other hand, Naxxramas was a joke. We cleared it on our third week or raiding, which was ridiculously easy, since we did it with only half of our core raiders. Like most guilds, we were soon able to clear it in a single evening, leaving us with nothing to do for months until Ulduar came out.

Between patches 3.0 and 3.1, raiding in World of Warcraft reached its lowest ebb, one to which I hope it will never return. Effectively, they removed all of the challenge to the game, and those of us who didn't leave wondered if it would ever return. For months, guilds have run the driest, ugliest content that Blizzard has ever been produced. As an introduction to the new expansion, Naxxramas was a horrible failure.

Fortunately, Ulduar has now come out. Okay, the siege area is kind of ugly, but the rest so far looks quite nice and I don't feel like I'm stuck in a nineties shooter. The fights so far seem well balanced, hard but not impossible, and rewarding skill rather than just brute force. I'm enjoying raiding again for the first time since October. Now I plan to simply forget that Naxxramas ever existed.

Noblegarden

Blizzard's holiday events have gone through quite an evolution over the years. Until October, they were innocuous little festivals, with lots of little fun things to do. For me, the two I really enjoyed were Winter Festival, a kind of Christmas event and Hallow's End, the Hallowe'en festival. You could open presents or kill the Headless Horseman and a bunch of other little fun things. They were part of the background, making Azeroth more of a living world.

In October, though, things changed. The holidays themselves stayed largely the same, but the Achievement system revamped them in significant ways. If you did all of the achievements for an event, you would get a title, and if you got all of the titles, you would get a mount, the Violet Proto-Drake. People will do anything for a title or a mount, as I myself proved during my "bear runs" in Zul'Aman last year.

This got more people interested in the events, but it also created the situation where, if you wanted the reward from the event, you had to do all the achievements. All of a sudden, the achievements required balancing, something they'd never needed before. Blizzard wanted to put some sort of limit on the number of mounts available, so they felt more like an achievement for those who got them. Other achievements, which were the result of pure luck, raised huge ire among the population, who saw the drake they'd worked hard to get for six month vanish because of the random number generator.

The disaster struck: "Be Mine!", an achievement for the Fool For Love title at Valentine's Day. On a four day event, you had to get eight different little candies from bags. However, the bags were only available once per hour and you only have a ten percent chance of getting one per hour. On average, you needed three bags to get all the candies. Even a cursory glance over that math will show the problem: even if you set your alarm to wake up every hour, there was a chance you wouldn't get the candies. If you didn't, there was a very good chance. Goodbye title. Goodbye drake.

The fan base went ballistic, more ballistic than I've ever seen them. Dozens of people claimed they were going to leave the game, and I believed them. What had been a minor incentive, a mount, to participate in fun and interesting festivals had become a source of frustration and anger. "Did they really expect us to wake up in the middle of the night?", people were asking. Blizzard had miscalculated. In order to be fun, achievements need to be at least somewhat challenging. However, they seemed to miss the point that their festivals were never challenging and were never really an achievement. They were fluff and attempting to add challenge or rarity to fluff upset the people who were having fun. It was like ordering push-ups at a Christmas party.

Noblegarden, on the other hand, was a fantastically handled little holiday. As the only holiday designed after the introduction of the titles and mount, it seemed to get the balance just right. True, getting the title meant finding literally hundreds of little eggs in towns full of dozens of others hunting those same eggs, but that's what Easter Egg hunts are all about. All the items needed were available from the eggs, but if they didn't drop, you could still buy them for chocolates, one of which was in each egg. So, you felt lucky when you got the items, but not frustrated when you didn't. I really enjoyed the event, something that I can't really say for "Fool For Love", which was imbalanced and frustrating or the New Years Festival, which was properly balanced, but boring.

When Octoberfest rolls around, we will see whether they learned their lesson when it comes to the achievement, "Have Keg, Will Travel", which requires you to get a special mount from the Octoberfest event. Two years ago, you could get one in much the same way as Noblegarden worked, but last year they changed them to a rare drop. If they learned anything from the disaster that was "Be Mine!", they'll change the achievement. Fortunately, given the thoroughly successful Noblegarden event we just witnessed, it seems like they have.